❝
All hushed and still within the house;
Without – all wind and driving rain;
But something whispers to my mind,
Through rain and through the wailing wind,
Never again.
Never again? Why not again?
Memory has power as real as thine.
❞
— Emily Brontë

❝
I never really came alive until,
I more or less died —
I’d floated along by hushed breeze and sail
I’d slept whilst they rowed.
You’d emerged in a place so far away
You’d grown in harsh heat —
You felt real thunder and deep disarray
You searched hard for light.
We locked eyes and made our haven from all
We found our true selves
We then got split, but vowed this bond won’t quell
We’ll find by inked delves. . .
❞

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Literature — art at its most sublime.

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Now I don’t pretend to know much ado about nothing but Pallas is meant to be a Greek God, one of the Titans: a male. A centaur is a mythical half man half horse and thus, male too. So, who’s the lady depicted in the picture above? My inept investigations took me via a typo from the mythical Titan to the Italian painter Titian (a.k.a., Tiziano Vecellio) (c. 1488–1576) who also painted Venus (et al.). . .

. . .who lest we forget is the god of Love (the subject of this posting). Titian, incidentally and interestingly was called by his contemporaries, “The Sun Amidst Small Stars” (which is the last line of Dante’s (see ^ up) poem Paradiso), According to the art scholar Gloria Fossi (2000) Titian’s technique of the application and usage of colour has had a profound influence on Western art. From Titian I got to Bronzino (a.k.a., Agnolo di Cosimo) (1503–1572), well because, he also painted Venus (et al.) and like Titian was of the Venetian school. . .

. . . they say Bronzino’s somewhat elongated figures always appear to be calm and a little too reserved (i.e., lacking the agitation and emotion of those painted by some others) and believe it or not I sensed that in her fingers and in the leggy long-backed cheeky cherub. Well from there I found my way to Western painting (hovering over the link on the Bronzino page I saw a pic of the girl with the pearl…) and just had to see what was included in this, the people’s canon:

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Literature — art at its most sublime.

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NOTES

*   Orientalism — us and them — who am I? who r U? Ways of Escape, wanting to be somewhere (anywhere?) other than here, but here’s not a geographic location, it’s a mindset that cannot, I fear, be vacated until the end of days. Ingres, who evidently had a penchant for the Orient, painted these paintings also:

Hard to marry such colour and enchantment with this photograph of Ingres; yet in the self-portrait said to be by him in his 78^th year, I detect an amazing head of youthful hair and a hint of a cheeky flair:

**   An odalisque (اوطه‌لق) was said to be a, hmm, let us say ‘chambermaid’ in the time of the Ottoman empire. And on I’m driven to forage and dig, an internet hunter and gatherer am I. I subscribe to this self-imposed penitence, relentless is the yearn, incessant is the burn, bereft of zest, I am. So here (the anonymous) you(s) go:

بس خلاص

بس خلاص

بس خلاص